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Old 07-27-2015, 03:07 PM   #9
BigJim
Senior Member
 
City: CA
Join Date: Oct 2012
Posts: 177
You certain..

That boat is not a Trawler?

We have a 36' diesel cabin cruiser in the PNW


Quote:
Originally Posted by Marin View Post
I think it depends on the boat, but even more, how the owner approaches owning and using a boat. We know people who are very anal about having every little detail on the boat absolutely perfect and they have no time for other pursuits; they devote almost all of their time, or free time, to taking care of the boat. The size of the boat is of no relevance other than the larger the boat, the longer some tasks take to do.

But most of the boaters we know, still working or retired, have multiple interests and they figure out how to spend time doing all of them. Their boat may not be showroom, but as long as it works and meets whatever their minimum aesthetic requirements are, they use it when they want to go boating and do the other things when they want to do them. This applies to the folks we know who have a Tolly 26 and people we know who have 52' Grand Banks.

Now, people who have larger boats more often than not have the means to have someone else work on them. So this, of course, frees up all kinds of time to pursue other interests.

We have a 36' diesel cabin cruiser in the PNW. I'm still working full time so obviously the time we have to use and work on this particular boat (we have other ones, too, that require some of our time) is pretty limited. So we do the best we can with the time we're willing to spend maintaining and using this boat, but it certainly does not dominate our lives.

While I will soon not be working full time at the job I have now, I will still be working a fair amount of my time on other pursuits. However, even though we will have more time to devote to the cruising boat have here, we will still have a lot of other recreational activities we want to continue pursuing. So while the PNW cabin cruiser will get more attention from us than it does now, it's certainly not going to become the focus of our lives just because we have more time available.

I will say this: when we first got this particular boat we immediately started thinking about getting a larger one. A big part of this was fueled by the fact that every time we went our boat we passed the dealer/charter dock that was full of newish boats of the same make as ours but larger models. "Boy, it'd be great to have a 42," we'd say, "or our real favorite, the 46."

We've owned this particular' boat now for over 17 years. We enjoy working on it when we have the time, particularly maintaining and refinishing the teak as the boat is old enough to have absolutely gorgeous old-growth wood on and in it.

But..... today when we pass the dealer/charter dock with its rows of beautiful newer, bigger boats we say there is no way in hell we would want a boat of our make that's one inch longer than the one we have now. We don't want to wax one more inch of hull, we don't want to take care of one more inch of teak decking, wse don't want to deal with one more inch of canvas and we don't want to keep up the bright finish of one more inch of cap and hand rail. We enjoy doing these things on our boat but we don't want to add the time necessary to deal with one more inch of it.
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